Hong Kong Builder
THE TRANSFORMATION OF A
A HOUSE
Photograph of the house after alteration work was completed as compared with its appearance (below) before. Both photographs were taken from practically the same viewpoint.
Interior view of the octagonal study.
In this year of our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Forty One, this Colony celebrated its hundredth birthday, and as one gazes around its business and residential pre- cincts one is confronted with many a reminder of its centennial antiquity in the shape of buildings which appear to have been built at or near its founding. Go- downs in Kennedy Town, tenements in Sai Ying Poon, business buildings in Victoria, and European residences on the Peak, all bear witness to the enterprise and acumen of our early settlers. So, too, do they bear wit- ness to the fact that a spirit of progressiveness was not one of the qualities automatically transmitted through the intervening generations. The procrastinating iner- tia which seemed to be a characteristic of Hong Kong until quite recently laid a blight on the inheritors of these original buildings and made them contented to live in and work in an environment which had long ago outlived its usefulness.
There is at least one exception, however, to this general observation, and in this article we have the extreme pleasure of publishing an instance of it.
There was a house on the Peak which in external ap- pearance and internal arrangement combined all the dreariness and dinginess which is such a common feature in the older type of Peak residence. Built with massive thick walls, ceilings which were dimly visible in the heights above, windows and doors heavily architraved and corniced which stretched from floor to ceiling, rooms which were placed at every conceivable angle and in
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